The Barcelona of the First World War years was a complex city, fully immersed in various social and political conflicts, and culturally very active, thanks, in part, to the presence of many artists who took refuge there. Within this context of vibrant modernity, an enigmatic and complex character arrived in the city to fight in a boxing match: Arthur Cravan. The Museu Picasso has wanted to dedicate an exhibition to this controversial figure -poet and writer, dadaist "avant la lettre", boxer, lecturer, performer, traveller─ who in 1916 took on the world champion Jack Johnson and managed to disturb the microcosm of Barcelona for a few weeks. His rather unconventional life and his disappearance continues to turn him, even today, into a myth with a lot to discover. The exhibition, which counts on a large volume of written and graphic documentation, helps us to approach some of these less known aspects of the trajectory of Cravan, and it is, at the same time, an excellent prelude to understanding the cultural environment of a Barcelona that Picasso would visit the following year.

Picasso first set foot Paris in the autumn of 1900, on a visit to the Universal Exposition. A year later he had his first Paris show, at the prestigious Vollard gallery, and had begun to make a name among the city's artists and intellectuals. The catalogue of the exhibition 'Picasso in Paris 1900-1907. Eating Fire', by Picasso expert Marilyn McCully, profiles the young artist's life during this crucial period, revealing the impact made on him by his first-hand exposure to the work of certain individual artists, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen, Rodin, Cézanne and Puvis de Chavannes and tracing the process that led him to forge a style of his own and become the leading figure of the French avant-garde.

Michael FitzGerald, author of this catalogue and curator of the homonymous exhibition, and who in 2006 organised for the Whitney Museum of American Art of New York the exhibition «Picasso and American Art», has constructed an entertaining and educational tour through the production of artists from very diverse backgrounds and cultures – from North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, Australia and Africa, who have been inspired by Picasso since his death. However, FitzGerald hasn't presented Picasso as a master to whom the rest of the artists are subordinated, if not, he has wanted to make known the way in which these creators have used the work of Picasso to elaborate their own works and how the dialogue with history and modernity has contributed to enriching and transforming contemporary culture.

In January 1937, Picasso began work on two etchings in which he poured forth a bitter satirical critique of General Franco and the violence being unleashed against Republican Spain, and a denunciation of the suffering of the victims of the country's bloody civil war. Each of the etchingsis composed of nine cartoons, initially intended to beprinted and sold as individual postcards. The artist chose the title "Dream and Lie of Franco" for these aquatints, which went on sale finally (uncut, in a folder with one of his poems) at the Paris International Exposition of that year. "Dream and Lie of Franco", one of the most emblematic works Picassocreated at the time, is the pivotal axisof the exhibition "Cartoons on the Front Line", which explores in depth the connections between the graphic and symbolic language Picasso used hereand the rest of the art and propaganda produced in the context of the Spanish Civil War. The show and the catalogue cast new light on the indissoluble links between Picasso and his work and the society and the time in which he lived.

This outstanding tour through of more than 250 images sheds light on the shifting relationship between Picasso and the modernista artist par excellence, Santiago Rusiñol. At the outset, Picasso deeply admired Rusiñol as a man and an artist and adopted many of his postulates and practices. Eventually, however, after this period of absorption (to use the term employed by Eduard Vallès, the exhibition curator) Picasso distanced himself from Rusiñol almost for good through satire and caricaturisation. This path (illustrated to perfection by Picasso's 21 portraits of Rusiñol ) is a paradigmatic example of the creative and life processes of the painter from Malaga.

Over the centuries Japanese erotic prints have been known by different names, such as shunga, makura-e or warai-e. Another related term was higa-e, meaning 'secret images'. This catalogue presents for the first time some twenty of these prints which belonged to Picasso. In order to establish a thought-provoking dialogue we have selected a number of Picasso's own erotic etchings and various works by other artists, both Japanese and Western, which together shed new light on the phenomenon of European interest in Japanese art and on the links between this and the work of Picasso.

The catalogue reproduces the entire series of Las Meninas that Picasso painted in 1957, together with other works by almost 25 different artists from various periods also inspired by Velázquez's masterpiece. By means of various essays and analyses of the featured works, the book invites a new reading of Picasso's series, rooted in the tradition of Spanish painting and at the same time highlighting its significance as a precursor of our contemporary interest in issues addressed by many subsequent interpretations, which have engaged concepts such as the space, the weight of the iconographic elements or the presence of the processes of artistic creation and of the artist himself in the resulting work